By PETER CALDER
If it's Saturday, this must be Seoul. That's the way it is when you're the Foreign Minister.
Even the title tends to estrange its holder, defining him as a man who's not really here, but somewhere else.
Phil Goff's predecessor, Don McKinnon, told him he would have to be travelling about 100 days a year to do the job properly.
"I thought that was nonsense," said Mr Goff on Thursday as he waited to board a flight to Canberra, "but it's about right."
Since taking on the portfolio, he has certainly given his passport a battering. There are stamps for East Timor, Australia, Fiji (twice), Samoa, the Cook Islands, Bougainville, Papua New Guinea, Indonesia, Japan, the Solomons (twice), Portugal, Belgium, Germany and the United Kingdom.
Next month he will have eight days in Bangkok and Manila, and in September 10 days in the United States and Canada.
This morning he is in Seoul, our Government's representative at the commemorations marking the 50th anniversary of the outbreak of war on the Korean peninsula.
It is his third weekend in a row out of the country, and he admits that his family - he has three teenage children - are less than impressed. Saturday mornings have been sacred through much of his parliamentary career, and today he should be watching one of his two sons play rugby or his daughter play netball.
But when the world is your office, it becomes hard to get home.
Thursday was Phil Goff's 47th birthday. He spent a positively self-indulgent three hours of it with his wife, Mary, on their Clevedon farmlet as the ministerial Fairlane waited in the drive.
"My wife bought me a wheelbarrow," he said with a slightly rueful grin. "I think she was hoping that one day I might be home to do the garden."
The luggage he brings to the airport bespeaks the hardened traveller with no time to wait for baggage handlers. Leaving for a six-day trip, he carries only a small and not-very-stuffed overnight bag, barely as big as the stout briefcase.
"There's six of everything in there," he says, though plainly he will be relying on the suit he is standing up in.
Travel is, of course, an occupational hazard, and Mr Goff knew to expect it. What he could not have predicted was how many matters would be competing for his attention - and in particular that Governments would be toppled in two Pacific states within days of each other.
"Yes, it's been a hell of a busy year," he says. "I welcome the challenges but I sometimes wish they wouldn't all come at once. One coup at a time would have been nice."
He remembers his children being glad he had landed the Foreign Affairs job "because they thought I might not be on TV as often, and they wouldn't get ribbed at school as much." But in fact he has been a fixture on most news bulletins for weeks now, and he is legendary among political journalists for his accessibility - in the Radio New Zealand newsroom they joke that he has never missed a deadline.
At times in sound bites he has appeared slightly hectoring, reminiscent of the head prefect dealing with a bunch of unruly fourth formers. Yet up close and one-on-one - which is how he does most of his work - the pitch drops several notches. Even at the adrenalised pace of the truly sleep-deprived (the night before we spoke, he got 3sfr1/4 hours' sleep) he is charming and unruffled, full of self-deprecating asides.
"They like karaoke," he says fearfully of next month's meeting with Asian counterparts in Bangkok, "so I don't know how I'll get around that. I've got a voice like a bullfrog. I hear there's a Maori concert party in Bangkok at the time so I'm going to pull a lot of strings to try and get them there."
Tired though he is, the guard doesn't drop for an instant. This is a man used to stating his position on the run, for whom each interview is a replay of the last and a rehearsal for the next. Asking him a question is like letting slip one of those rabbits greyhounds chase: he's off after it, hot on its trail, and he won't give it up till he's chewed it up - or you've managed to snatch it back.
On why he won't talk to George Speight if the hostages are released: "That would give him legitimacy, and he is a terrorist. I don't need to talk to him, but I can talk to people in Fiji who say that they disapprove of his actions but have sympathy for his cause. I might not like the attitudes of the Fijian Nationalist Party - who claim to be Christians but in whose eyes not everybody is created equally in the sight of God - but I will work with them.
"What I must not do is give legitimacy to a person who seeks to achieve his personal, financial and political ambitions through the barrel of a gun."
He is equally surefooted whether discussing the possibility that New Zealand might re-establish diplomatic links with North Korea ("The viewpoint, I think rightly, is that keeping North Korea in isolation does not contribute in the most effective way to international peace") or the suggestion that he is a Tory in disguise ("I tend not to use words like right-wing and left-wing because they're labels and hide more than they display").
But sift the flood of words and you realise this is the language of diplomacy - careful, littered with qualifications and seeming to say much more than it actually does. Hard talking may go on behind closed doors, but the public utterances will always be precise and bland.
In his other portfolio, Justice, Mr Goff can afford to be more outspoken and has attracted liberal criticism for being a redneck. He denies being tough on law and order because there are votes in such a stance.
"I've never said anything in politics that I didn't believe in, and the day that I do will be the day I've been there too long and have to get out. It's not whether you're tough or soft in law and order, it's a question of whether the policy works. Boot camps sound good, but I've seen the research on boot camps - they produce very fit young criminals but they don't change their way of thinking. The electorate would like it, but it wouldn't work."
The high-profile Mr Goff has long been seen as the only potential challenger to Helen Clark's leadership. There were rumblings of a challenge in January 1999, and it was widely expected he would topple her if Labour had lost in November. But now Mr Goff says their relationship is "a lot more than a good professional one" and is full of praise for his leader, saying history will judge her the most effective Labour Premier since Peter Fraser.
"You may say you would expect me to say that, but I'm saying it because it happens to be true. I had a rough period with Helen after Mike Moore was overthrown. He was a hell of a good friend of mine [the two men flatted together in their late teens and Mr Moore managed Mr Goff's first tilt at Parliament in 1981] and I thought what happened to him was unfair. But that's behind us now."
I might have emerged from a meeting with the Foreign Minister frustrated that it all seemed so bloodless. But at the last moment - it was almost time to board the plane - there was a flash of something approaching passion. He recalled, unprompted, a visit a few weeks ago to Europe to mark the 50th anniversary of the Sherman Plan by which the French and the Germans decided to merge their heavy industry.
"It was really important symbolically," he explained, "because it made it impossible for them to go to war. We worry about these conflicts in Fiji and the Solomons, but to see these countries with ancient rivalries, which half a century ago were engaged in a fight to the death, now working together as part of a European Union - it just gives you a little bit of confidence that maybe we can change the world."
<i>Calder at large:</i> The world according to Goff ...
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